Michael J. Molloy

I arrive on the fifth of September and to my amazement, there’s a little white van at the airport with a Cana—paper Canadian flag on the door and a guy there saying, “Are you Molloy?” “Yes.” “Come on with me.” And he said, “I’ll take you to the hotel.” And I said, “Uh no don’t take me to hotel. I’m—Where, where is Mister Saint Vincent?” “Oh, he’s at your office.” “Oh Office?” “Well, there’s no office”. I said, “So, well you better take me there.” So, I arrived there. And he’d, in the meantime, negotiated for the best office space in the town. There’s no furniture to be had so he’d, he’d got two guys—one, one, one Brit and one Sikh—and threatened them with an inch of their lives if th—If they didn’t have the furniture in our office within forty-eight hours, we’d put a sign on the front day and say, “We can’t open today because Mister So-and-So and Mister So-and-So let us down.” So, I—I arrived there just as the furniture’s arriving and there’s all these people that had flown in from other places. And I’m standing at the, at, with my suitcases and bags looking around and I hear from the back of the thing, “Well, did you—come here to look around Molloy or are you going to get to work?” So, I, so I said, “What do you want, Roger?” He said, “Okay, here’s—” And he gives me, hands me a plan. He said, “This is how this stuff is to be deployed. I’ve got to go talk to the British Embassy. I’ll m—I’ll meet you in an hour.” So, all of a sudden, I’m in charge of setting up the furniture with all these people I’ve never met before.

And the big problem we have is we got sixty days to get people out of here. We can’t afford to mail people things. There’s, there’s no time. Let—And we don’t trust the government, anyways. And so, what do we do? And a brilliant clerk who had come along had this—had brought along a numbering machine. You know—it like a stamping thing. And it would repeat the same number up to nine times and then move onto the next one. So, he breaks this out and he says, “Supposing when the people bring their application, we stamp the number on the application and we stamp it on another piece of paper and we give it to them and we say, ‘Watch for your number in the newspaper and watch for the number on that window over there.’” So that was that was our secret weapon. And it, it—The whole, the whole operation revolved around it because you could—It was perfectly secure; the only people who knew the number were the were the people concerned.”

And then sixty days later, we were out of there. I stayed an extra week and spent the week in Nairobi. And remember that was the first time an ambassador had ever noticed me. They were, you know, we had a really go—good Ambassador there, or High Commissioner looking out for us there. And I got the first end of the, I got word as soon as I get there, “I’d like to take you home to lunch to thank you for the work you did.” Well, unheard of; Ambassador’s taking me home. So, we go home. Very, very nice. And we come back. And by the time we get back from lunch, word is out there’s a visa officer in town. I’m on the fifth floor. Visa—You know, immigration’s always on lower floors; we’re in the fifth floor. Embassy’s up here. And we get—The door opens up and people fall into the elevator. The waiting room is so packed and the Ambassador sort of does a little jolt. And I said, “I’ll look after this, Sir.” And I waded in there and, and, uh, and—And I got up on a chair and I said, “Okay. Everybody with a Kenyan passport, put your hand up.” So, all these hands go up. I said, “Go away; we’ll be back in two months. We promise. Go away. Now everybody whose got a Ugandan passport, we’ll deal with you.” So, I’d spent a couple weeks doing—I’d spent the rest of the week doing that. And then made it home.